What is Special Snowflake Syndrome?

I'm currently confused about what Special Snowflake Syndrome really is about.

The laconic says that this is about someone who goes out of their way to make themselves look more special, and is related to Common Mary Sue Traits.

But the description seem to limit this to Tabletop Games or RP Gs due to how the rules and game mechanics can be abused. And most of the examples and wicks does follow that (almost all of it refer to Tabletop Games).

So, is this a Tabletop Games/RPG only trope?

That description has a fairly foggy Example as a Thesis at the top. It's a trope about characters (typically in games where you can "construct" a character) who have very divergent properties that are at odds with the rest.

So this trope is, as originally and intentionally, written as a gaming trope?

I want to know whether the laconic or description is wrong, because they seem to be describing vastly different things...

In real life a Special Snowflake is someone who thinks they are more unique or more different than everyone else and like more interesting unique things. Basically a new meaner way to say Hipster.

How does that then apply to this trope I wonder...

The idea is that a Player Character in a game (or The Protagonist of a story) needs to stand out from the crowd. Nobody wants to play Generic Greedy Dwarf #1845, or Generic Xenophobic Elf #77614. Instead, their character has to distinguish themselves by being different from their brethren in some really obvious way, which may then become memetically imitated until it becomes a cliche itself.

The iconic originator of this trope is Drizzt Do'urden, a notorious character in a D&D Expanded Universe novel series based on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Drow Elves in that world are Chaotic Evil and base their matriarchal societies around treachery and backstabbing, with males basically held as slaves. Drizzt was a Special Snowflake, a male, Chaotic Good Drow who resisted the evil of his parent society and went adventuring.

This started a meme that every Player Character Drow from that point onward was a Chaotic Good rebel, Dual Wielding scimitars and named some anagram of Drizzt, meaning that everyone was trying to be "special" by making a carbon copy of him.

The Order of the Stick parodied this by introducing the character of Zz'dtri, who pretended to be a Chaotic Good rebel in order to gain the protagonists' trust and backstab them. (He was later abducted by Wizards of the Coast's Product Identity lawyers.)

edited 12th May '14 1:13:23 PM by Fighteer

Yeah it is not very clear how the opening crawl about being wakambi instead of an elf is related to that. I mean, I guess the 'unique' feature in that case would be that the wakambi was not in Africa?? IDK, it is confusing.

It's only confusing if you don't know the basic setup of D&D. The intro is discussing how players will bring really weird and unusual characters to the gaming table, even though they don't convey any kind of gameplay advantage, just for the sake of being unique.

I'm not really sure how this could be expanded beyond Tabletop RPGs to any great degree, because even Wide-Open Sandbox games constrain your choice of character.

edited 12th May '14 2:43:07 PM by Fighteer

Fan Fics are an easy thing to point to. Is SSS supposed to be about a player's need to be unique, or a player's tendency to copy something else in order to be "unique"?

Copying something else to be unique in fanfiction sounds like Copy Cat Sue

The laconic says that it's about a character who goes out of their way to make themselves appear more special, and specifies nothing about it being limited to character selection/creation in gaming systems, implying that the trope is much broader than it currently is.

edited 13th May '14 6:42:19 AM by theAdeptRogue

The extreme case of that is Overused Copycat Character.

It could indeed apply in such situations, but it tends to show up more often in fan works because they don't have any kind of editing or self-censorship to weed out such obviously ridiculous things.

^^^^ That does not really line up with what you said though; you said "different from their brethren". Being a different species entirely is not really the same thing as being, like, a lawful neutral member of an always-chaotic specie or, like, idk a psionic dwarf or whatever. Is this about choosing more obscure types/jobs in general or about making your character some sort of exception to their type standard? Or is it about both?

Any or all of those. When most people play generic dwarves, elves, humans, etc.; you can be a Special Snowflake by bringing in a tiefling aquatic elf. Or you can make your dwarf a female teetotaler mage with a pink afro and toenail polish.